In the first three chapters, the main themes that comes to mind are grief and sadness. Sethe displays a great amount of grief over the loss of her children. she lost her two sons, and murders her daughter, as well as the death of Baby Suggs. Also, Sethe's daughter Denver, has felt loneliness because she has no friends, she is a shy girl without hardly any knowledge of the outside world. I believe that her past shows her innocence because she was a slave and not very knowledgeable of how cruel the world could fully be. She had not yet experienced any true loss or hardship. Also, I believe that the present is much more experienced in the fact that Sethe knows the hardships of slavery and in an attempt to protect her children she tries to murder them and only killing her newborn daughter and her sons running away. This event marks the experience of Sethe's emotion.